- Email: [email protected]
Living and fossil bryozoa, recent advances in research
292 fascinating for those with an interest in the area, contains little of methodological or philosophic value for the specialist and n o t much of general application to the geographer with a wide ranging interest. Notwithstanding the individual excellence of some articles, a strong editorial hand is required to justify binding so much disparate material between two hard covers. Whereas there may be a need for a series of major review articles describing the state of the art in the various branches of geography for those who wish to consider themselves as geographers rather than narrow specialists, I d o u b t t h a t this volume in particular, and the latter ones of this series in general, fulfil t h a t need. The limited range of many of the articles is hardly adequate to do this. For instance, Taylor's article deals with a small area of mid-Wales, it quotes local information in great detail, and its more general comments are simplistic and do no justice to botanical methods of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. At this level of detail, a survey of the field of modern geography would require a library to itself. At the level of research, it is unlikely that a worker would find more than one article of interest in one volume, which can hardly be an economic proposition. With its lack of thematic or methodological unity, and its partial view of the field, the series has n o t lived up to its early promise. One wonders how many more volumes are projected, or perhaps we are seeing the emergence of the first journal produced in hard covers. G. BOULTON (Norwich)
Living and Fossil Bryozoa, Recent Advances in Research. Proceedings of the International Bryozoology Association Conference, Durham, 1971. G. P. Larwood (Editor). Academic Press, London, 1973, 634 pp., £12.50. The publication in 1973 of a book over 600 pages long packed tight with 58 articles written by 65 of the 68 participants of the second International Bryozoology Association Conference held in the University of Durham in 1971, prompts reflection on the purpose of such meetings. Not t h a t students of bryozoans (shy aquatic colonial organisms) are unique in responding to that insidious primaeval urge which periodically induces specialists to foregather -- possibly to spawn some new ideas or adopt a few. Nowadays scientific conferences abound, invited papers are worth their weight in air tickets, and participants with popular chats are fast becoming the intellectuals' reply to the jet set. But there are two distinct species of conferences differing, as it were, in their anatomy, function and environmental impact. One is composed of scientists from disparate disciplines, each there to review his speciality either in the light of a new or refurbished concept or as an exercise in maintaining the flow of ideas within science generally. The other is made up of
293 devotees to one particular speciality who pay homage to their preferred deity within the scientific hierarchy b y reciting their current contributions to its well-being. Both serve a useful function but have an entirely different order of impact on the scientific community. Publications emanating from the first category of conferences may become widely read classics influencing the course of a broad range of sciences by weakening the boundaries between them. Books recounting the proceedings of the second category, despite any intrinsic merit as works of scholarship, are unlikely to command the attention of a large audience. Indeed because there is no need at such conferences to talk to, or write for, the non-specialist, the mystique of a speciality is intensified by the uninhibited use of its terminology, and its introverted segregation from the rest of science is consequently further strengthened. The proceedings under review unequivocally belong to the latter category and it is a naive piece of publicity for the publishers to assert on the dust jacket that the volume is "an invaluable source of information for zoologists, geologists and palaeontologists generally". What the publishers should have admitted, and thereby earned admiration for candour, is that there is enough m o n e y in the trade to underwrite scholarly works of limited appeal because, although not every natural scientist is going to rush o u t and b u y the book, it is the sort of reference volume one would expect to find in main libraries and for bryozoologists it is patently indispensible. It is, in effect, an almost complete inventory of researches on bryozoans that were being undertaken in 1971; and it must be reassuring to bryozoologists, although possibly not to novitiates, to find that the phylum is n o w being explored along so many lines of enquiry. The spectrum of recorded research activity is astonishingly broad. There are ecological articles ranging from the place of bryozoans in various Recent and fossil communities, mathematical analyses of the density of their occurrence and the part played by colonial budding in competition for substrate, to pycnogonid predation, seasonal effects on species diversity and settlement, and the potentiality of oxygen isotope ratios in the carbonate skeleton as indices of environmental temperatures. There are papers of physiological and histological interest including reports on the innervation of the frontal structures in Electra, the ultrastructure of tentacles and the adhesion of colonies to the substrate. There are studies of the ultrastructure of skeletal fabrics and models to illustrate the mode of growth of living and extinct groups. And inevitably there are systematic contributions varying from lists of newly identified or described fossil species to multivariate analysis of polymorphism and a numerical reclassification of entoprocts and ectoprocts. There are few deficiencies of a general nature in the volume, although it is, here and there, evident that an over-elaborate terminology has come to mean different things for different people. Maybe the b o o k itself will demonstrate to its contributors that the maintenance of personal vocabularies is a luxury no wellintegrated part of natural science can afford.
294 As is to be expected in a compilation of this nature, the papers vary in size from provisional statements on work-in-hand consisting of less than 1000 words, to elegantly composed essays on original research five or six times as long. Nearly all articles are accompanied b y well-prepared text-figures and/or photographs clearly reproduced in good contrast. Indeed the quality of text and illustrations, which is generally very high, is witness to careful preparation b y contributors under the painstaking supervision of the editor. Congratulations to them all! May they have time and o p p o r t u n i t y to read what their fellow bryozoologists have written, before they get caught up in the febrile preparations for the next conference. For the rest of us, it's dip and sip! A. WILLIAMS (Belfast)
Early Pliocene Marine Climate and Environment of the Eastern Ventura Basin, Southern California. J.P. Kern. University of California Press, Los Angeles, Calif., 1973, 117 pp., U.S. $5.00. Research during the last century on the benthic marine molluscs living along the eastern edge of the north Pacific and on the Cenozoic molluscs of the adjacent land has resulted in major contributions to the theoretical explanation of faunal distribution patterns, to the procedures by which provincial boundaries can be recognized, and to our ability to apply modern zoogeographic principles to paleoclimatic analysis of the fossil record. Kern's paper is an important addition to this long and fruitful tradition in paleoclimatic research. The northeast Pacific has been the site for zoogeographic--paleoclimatic work for several reasons. Correlation o f the marine climatic gradient with latitude along the relatively straight north--south coast is n o t obscured by second-order effects of a complex geography. Faunal distributions can be related on the one h~nd to differences in marine climate and on the other hand to broad patterns of oceanic circulation and upwelling and to specific geographic features such as Point Conception in Southern California and Cape San Lucas at the south end of Baja California. Similar relationships are evident in the highly fossiliferous Cenozoic sedimentary rocks which occur in greatest abundance along the coast from Washington to Baja California. Earlier paleontologists recognized that in strata of a given age faunal changes from north to south were comparable to those in the adjacent modern ocean. They also recognized that within a stratigraphic section faunal changes resulted from a generally southward shift of faunal ranges during the Cenozoic cooling trend. For example, the northern limits of tropical taxa shifted from Washington in the Eocene to California in the Miocene and to southern Baja California at the present.
Living and Fossil Bryozoa, Recent Advances in Research. Proceedings of the International Bryozoology Association Conference, Durham, 1971. G. P. Larwood (Editor). Academic Press, London, 1973, 634 pp., £12.50. The publication in 1973 of a book over 600 pages long packed tight with 58 articles written by 65 of the 68 participants of the second International Bryozoology Association Conference held in the University of Durham in 1971, prompts reflection on the purpose of such meetings. Not t h a t students of bryozoans (shy aquatic colonial organisms) are unique in responding to that insidious primaeval urge which periodically induces specialists to foregather -- possibly to spawn some new ideas or adopt a few. Nowadays scientific conferences abound, invited papers are worth their weight in air tickets, and participants with popular chats are fast becoming the intellectuals' reply to the jet set. But there are two distinct species of conferences differing, as it were, in their anatomy, function and environmental impact. One is composed of scientists from disparate disciplines, each there to review his speciality either in the light of a new or refurbished concept or as an exercise in maintaining the flow of ideas within science generally. The other is made up of
293 devotees to one particular speciality who pay homage to their preferred deity within the scientific hierarchy b y reciting their current contributions to its well-being. Both serve a useful function but have an entirely different order of impact on the scientific community. Publications emanating from the first category of conferences may become widely read classics influencing the course of a broad range of sciences by weakening the boundaries between them. Books recounting the proceedings of the second category, despite any intrinsic merit as works of scholarship, are unlikely to command the attention of a large audience. Indeed because there is no need at such conferences to talk to, or write for, the non-specialist, the mystique of a speciality is intensified by the uninhibited use of its terminology, and its introverted segregation from the rest of science is consequently further strengthened. The proceedings under review unequivocally belong to the latter category and it is a naive piece of publicity for the publishers to assert on the dust jacket that the volume is "an invaluable source of information for zoologists, geologists and palaeontologists generally". What the publishers should have admitted, and thereby earned admiration for candour, is that there is enough m o n e y in the trade to underwrite scholarly works of limited appeal because, although not every natural scientist is going to rush o u t and b u y the book, it is the sort of reference volume one would expect to find in main libraries and for bryozoologists it is patently indispensible. It is, in effect, an almost complete inventory of researches on bryozoans that were being undertaken in 1971; and it must be reassuring to bryozoologists, although possibly not to novitiates, to find that the phylum is n o w being explored along so many lines of enquiry. The spectrum of recorded research activity is astonishingly broad. There are ecological articles ranging from the place of bryozoans in various Recent and fossil communities, mathematical analyses of the density of their occurrence and the part played by colonial budding in competition for substrate, to pycnogonid predation, seasonal effects on species diversity and settlement, and the potentiality of oxygen isotope ratios in the carbonate skeleton as indices of environmental temperatures. There are papers of physiological and histological interest including reports on the innervation of the frontal structures in Electra, the ultrastructure of tentacles and the adhesion of colonies to the substrate. There are studies of the ultrastructure of skeletal fabrics and models to illustrate the mode of growth of living and extinct groups. And inevitably there are systematic contributions varying from lists of newly identified or described fossil species to multivariate analysis of polymorphism and a numerical reclassification of entoprocts and ectoprocts. There are few deficiencies of a general nature in the volume, although it is, here and there, evident that an over-elaborate terminology has come to mean different things for different people. Maybe the b o o k itself will demonstrate to its contributors that the maintenance of personal vocabularies is a luxury no wellintegrated part of natural science can afford.
294 As is to be expected in a compilation of this nature, the papers vary in size from provisional statements on work-in-hand consisting of less than 1000 words, to elegantly composed essays on original research five or six times as long. Nearly all articles are accompanied b y well-prepared text-figures and/or photographs clearly reproduced in good contrast. Indeed the quality of text and illustrations, which is generally very high, is witness to careful preparation b y contributors under the painstaking supervision of the editor. Congratulations to them all! May they have time and o p p o r t u n i t y to read what their fellow bryozoologists have written, before they get caught up in the febrile preparations for the next conference. For the rest of us, it's dip and sip! A. WILLIAMS (Belfast)
Early Pliocene Marine Climate and Environment of the Eastern Ventura Basin, Southern California. J.P. Kern. University of California Press, Los Angeles, Calif., 1973, 117 pp., U.S. $5.00. Research during the last century on the benthic marine molluscs living along the eastern edge of the north Pacific and on the Cenozoic molluscs of the adjacent land has resulted in major contributions to the theoretical explanation of faunal distribution patterns, to the procedures by which provincial boundaries can be recognized, and to our ability to apply modern zoogeographic principles to paleoclimatic analysis of the fossil record. Kern's paper is an important addition to this long and fruitful tradition in paleoclimatic research. The northeast Pacific has been the site for zoogeographic--paleoclimatic work for several reasons. Correlation o f the marine climatic gradient with latitude along the relatively straight north--south coast is n o t obscured by second-order effects of a complex geography. Faunal distributions can be related on the one h~nd to differences in marine climate and on the other hand to broad patterns of oceanic circulation and upwelling and to specific geographic features such as Point Conception in Southern California and Cape San Lucas at the south end of Baja California. Similar relationships are evident in the highly fossiliferous Cenozoic sedimentary rocks which occur in greatest abundance along the coast from Washington to Baja California. Earlier paleontologists recognized that in strata of a given age faunal changes from north to south were comparable to those in the adjacent modern ocean. They also recognized that within a stratigraphic section faunal changes resulted from a generally southward shift of faunal ranges during the Cenozoic cooling trend. For example, the northern limits of tropical taxa shifted from Washington in the Eocene to California in the Miocene and to southern Baja California at the present.